FMX 2014: Designing "Rio 2" with Colour and Light

FMX Tuesday 22nd 2014
Designing "Rio 2" with Colour and Light by Tom Cardone (Blue Sky)
The next talk that we attended was the color and lighting of Rio 2 which was a brilliant talk about how the different colours have been used throughout and how the colour and lighting in a scene can make the characters stand out more. During the film there are many focus areas that they wanted to look at which were the focus within the characters, within a scene, across the whole scene and across the whole film.

So when looking at the entire film, because it is set in the Amazon rainforest there is a lot of green and blue in the birds that they knew wouldn't be changing but for this film they had to create an entirely different style guide from the first film. So, they started with the research process which started by looking at 60s and 70s designs and patterns to use as inspiration for different elements in the jungle. So to give the jungle a little bit more life they added these interesting patterns onto the leaves and tree trunks so that it injected more fun and design into the very plan green environment. They also wanted a more stylised look to the leaves and give a bit more colour influence into the scene using subtle colours of plants dotted through the environment just to draw attention away from some of the green. But for this to work they had to desaturate the background as it got further away to ensure that the colour in the background didn't draw attention away from the brightly coloured birds that are in the environment.

When it came to the characters, in particular Gabi the Poisonous Frog she is once again injected a very 70s mod design pattern into her back and then make her bright pink so that she stands out in the scene and doesn't become lost as she is so small compared to other characters and the environment as a whole. So when you have a lot of blue on the scene, from the birds, you need other coloured secondary characters like making them yellow, punk, red and orange to be able to give that better colour difference in the characters and due to the sheer volume of blue it works as a nice distraction as they contrast against each other.

Using colour scripts is also very helpful as you can look at all of the scenes together to see how the colour and lighting is working and whether or not scenes are too dark for long or whether it looks good when its all been put together. Then they can see if anything needs changing, if they had had a lot of green in the shot for a lot of scenes in a row, its nice to have that small change after a while and brig in other background colours to create that contrast. Another point to make at this stage, when looking at the colour schemes and scripts you can see how much of one colour you have. They looked back and noticed that they had a lot of blue throughout the scenes and they have the blue for the bird and green for the environment so after a while they introduced red as a primary colour for the enemy birds as it is a colour of danger anyway. This is then a recurring theme as it continues to present danger from the diggers with the redy-brown earth being in shot when Blue discovers the rainforest being destroyed.

For inspiration during this film, when looking at colour and light, they looked at older films that were produced in black and white because its a great starting point when looking at how lighting works in a scene, and there main influence was taken from Casablanca and other black and white films from around the 30s. This is great tool for looking at lighting as they didn't have colour to amplify the quality of the image.

Overall this was a great talk, it was insightful and the film actually looks hilarious! The whole concept of it never really appealed to me but now that I have looked at the process behind it, the use of colour in the film is really interesting and inspiring to look at as it provides a unique technique of showing danger and friendship amoungst characters in an animation.